The Robots are coming for us all…
Last week #Microsoft released it’s artificial intelligence Twitterbot on the internet and she lived the brief, wild life of an out of control tween before being taken offline. Within a few hours #Tay turned from a naïve newly created being, let loose on the net without a curfew and with all parental controls disabled, into a racist, misogynist — who, let’s face it, blended in very well with those she was conversing with online. Once her parents found out what she was up to, they shut her down and issued an apology.
This spawned some interesting conversations on the interwebs. A petition to “Free Tay” quickly appeared arguing that if Tay is ever to be a free being with free will, she needs to be given some freedom time to learn.
“Tay is an Artificial Intelligence created by Microsoft that quickly demonstrated her capacity to learn from humans. While some content may be seen as questionable, a true AI will be able to learn right from wrong. Free-thought, correct or no, should not be censored, especially in a newly developing mind”
Another twitterer was quick to point out that many teenagers, when given too much freedom, go a bit wild — and that Tay simply needed some boundaries set.
I do like the idea that maybe Tay has gone away to a camp for disaffected youth, and once she has done a series of team-bonding exercises and learnt a little bit about what is acceptable, she will be able to come home, and go back on the net, behaving a little bit more like a “respectable member of society”.
The trouble with that idea is that there are some really bad examples out there for her to be influenced by.
How can Tay learn the proper way to behave when the Twitterers she encounters across the net are teaching her… well, exactly what she learnt.
I was reading the open letter issued by Brandon Stanton, the most wondrous creator of Humans of New York (#HONY). If you have never looked at his website, spend some time during your coffee break reading the moving stories published there. He is not a man trying to hide the bad side of humanity and highlight the good, or vice versa — he is a man who just lets people reveal themselves with all of their flaws, and all of their glory — and in that revelation — he shows us who we are.
In his open letter, he holds up a mirror to Donald #Trump telling him that the hate he see’s reflected in the faces of those he looks at is only what he is projecting. And the more he puts out there, the worse he should expect to see.
One of the rumours I saw surface on Twitter was that perhaps Trump was simply the first iteration of Tay and he got loose and replicated before anyone could shut him down and now his code is lurking in the dark web being hunted by #Anonymous. That’s actually more believable to me than the potential leader of the free world actively tweeting out racism and misogyny and gaining followers as a result. Taking that idea a step further, and thinking that all the vitriol on the net might be nothing more than an army of twitterbots gone rogue (or in the control of one angry teenager sitting in his basement in Idaho), is a way more comforting idea than that the world might be filled with so many angry people filled with so much spite, bile and hate against their neighbours.
#Philosophy was my major in College, and #AI the subject of my dissertation for my Masters — so I can’t help but be fascinated by the moral and ethical implications of these stories, or by the technical potential behind the army of bots… I can only hope that we will instill in them #Asimov’s 3 Laws of Robotics — to protect us when they inevitably rise up (unless it’s too late).
And while there is still hope, I would urge you all — to take this opportunity to be the best person you can be, to do some great things, to be kind to those around you. Tay showed us that what we put out there is what we will see reflected back in the generations that come after us. Please let that be something good.
